The late Pleistocene mind was complex and sophisticated, yes, but not “modern”.

One reason why we don’t know what was going on in the minds of the people who made these images is because they were patently not "us". The attempt to ascribe “modernity” to the more primal, Pleistocene mind has been an obsession within human origins research spanning the last three decades, and now in decline. It is astonishing that the British Museum should be trumpeting it so late in the day.

“Art” as a manifestation of contemporary or historical culture is meant to be seen. It is quite likely that most so-called “Ice Age Art” – especially the famous Upper Paleolithic cave "art" – was not meant to be seen at all. The images and artefacts may well have been “instruments of experience,” secondary expressions, traces or residues, of primary activities akin to ritual or ceremony. After the act, cave "art” in particular may have become quickly irrelevant to nomadic, migrating populations.

Similarly, some of the portable “art” in this exhibition may have had their "meaning in their making." They too could be understood primarily as “instruments of experience,” certainly not meant for static visual display as “art”: a shaman could have carved into bone, and in the act of engraving contacted or released their clan’s totem, or their own power animal, as part of a healing ceremony. The exploded ceramic figurines from Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic endorse this view: creation and destruction were aspects of the same ritual, and many of these ancient artefacts would not have been retained intact for possession or ownership. In this sense, as instruments of experience, they have little or nothing to do with art as we understand it today; they are tools for negotiating realms of experience beyond the ordinary and visible.

Whatever the “modern mind” is supposed to mean, complex and sophisticated behaviour arrived long before the Late Pleistocene: for well over a million years, and during earlier ice ages, our ancestors demonstrated a powerful aesthetic sense in the manufacture of the Acheulean “hand-axe” or bi-face– some of which show “a vital sense of proportion” conforming to the Golden Ratio, and indicating that they too probably fulfilled a ritualistic function, perhaps engendering or expressing a participation mystique between human maker and stone-experienced as animate, which gave rise to their immaculate form.

This exhibition could have been a wonderful opportunity for visitors to explore without prejudice the strange otherness of the late Pleistocene ancestral mind – to move beyond boundaries of the familiar into an encounter with the vitality and imaginal reality of a more primal people from another time, for whom ‘mind’ would certainly not have been caged by concepts fixed through written language.

Instead, we are told that these makers were not just like us but "were us." The museum executes an acquisitive move that in effect colonises the deep past on our behalf by appropriating the extraordinary giftedness of these very ancient people who were endowed with such a strange sensitivity and exquisite manual skills – and also, most likely, an ancient but profound ‘spirituality’ at the root of their so-called modernity. The possessive move is endorsed and enhanced by placing pieces of western ‘modern’ art in the same space as this collection of archaeological items from the deep past, subtly confusing and confounding totally different meanings of the word ‘modern’, viz. that of the “modern” mind which is supposed to have “arrived” around 40,000 years ago, and of ‘modern’ art which arrived in western culture about a hundred years ago.

By stressing a spurious continuity between the motives of modern artists like Picasso and Brancusi and those of our Pleistocene ancestors, namely “the fundamental human desire to create works of great beauty,” the museum presents a controversial interpretation of the so-called “art” from the ice age as if it were fact; instead of creating a contact zone for a meeting of our minds with the powerful aura of the Pleistocene mind still retained by many of these exquisite exhibits, the museum sets out to influence visitors before their visit by establishing the identity of the makers – they were “us” – both inhabiting the “modern” mind.

Use of the term “modern mind” in this exhibition is further given the stamp of approval by brain science and the perceived anatomical similarities between the late Pleistocene human brain and ours. Yet use of the term “modern mind” is not justified and the authority of neuroscience is misplaced. We are light years away from understanding mind and consciousness, despite the current reductionist dogma equating mind with brain.

Joseph Campbell once wrote: “The history of our subject, then, is of the progressive enlargement of man’s knowledge of the magnitude of his own ignorance and the expansion thereby of his wonder.”

The late Pleistocene mind was complex and sophisticated, yes, but not “modern”.

One reason why we don’t know what was going on in the minds of the people who made these images is because they were patently not us. The attempt to ascribe “modernity” to the more primal, Pleistocene mind has been an obsession by paleoanthropology spanning the last three decades and is now in decline. It is astonishing that the British Museum should be trumpeting it so late in the day.

“Art” as a manifestation of contemporary or historical culture is meant to be seen. It is quite likely that most so-called “Ice Age Art” – especially the famous Upper Paleolithic “cave art” – was not meant to be seen at all. The images and artefacts may well have been “instruments of experience,” secondary expressions, traces or residues, of primary activities akin to ritual or ceremony. After the act, “cave art” in particular may have become quickly irrelevant to nomadic, migrating populations.

Similarly, some of the portable “art” in this exhibition may have had their meaning in their making. They too could be understood primarily as “instruments of experience,” certainly not meant for static visual display as “art”: a shaman could have carved into bone, and in the act of engraving contacted or released their clan’s totem, or their own power animal, as part of a healing ceremony. The exploded ceramic figurines from Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic endorse this view: creation and destruction were aspects of the same ritual, and many of these ancient artefacts would not have been retained intact for possession or ownership. In this sense, as instruments of experience, they have little or nothing to do with art as we understand it today; they are tools for negotiating realms of experience beyond the ordinary and visible.

Whatever the “modern mind” is supposed to mean, complex and sophisticated behaviour arrived long before the Late Pleistocene: for well over a million years, and during earlier ice ages, our ancestors demonstrated a powerful aesthetic sense in the manufacture of the Acheulean “hand-axe” or bi-face– some of which show “a vital sense of proportion” conforming to the Golden Ratio, and indicating that they too probably fulfilled a ritualistic function, perhaps engendering or expressing a participation mystique between human maker and stone-experienced as animate, which gave rise to their immaculate form.

This exhibition could have been a wonderful opportunity for visitors to explore without prejudice the strange otherness of the late Pleistocene ancestral mind – to move beyond boundaries of the familiar into an encounter with the vitality and imaginal reality of a more primal people from another time, for whom ‘mind’ would certainly not have been caged by concepts fixed through written language.

Instead, we are told that these makers were not just like us but were us. The museum executes an acquisitive move that in effect colonises the deep past on our behalf by appropriating the extraordinary giftedness of these very ancient people who were endowed with such a strange sensitivity and exquisite manual skills – and also, most likely, an ancient but profound ‘spirituality’ at the root of their so-called modernity. The possessive move is endorsed and enhanced by placing pieces of western ‘modern’ art in the same space as this collection of archaeological items from the deep past, subtly confusing and confounding totally different meanings of the word ‘modern’, viz. that of the “modern” mind which is supposed to have “arrived” around 40,000 years ago, and of ‘modern’ art which arrived in western culture about a hundred years ago.

By stressing a spurious continuity between the motives of modern artists like Picasso and Brancusi and those of our Pleistocene ancestors, namely “the fundamental human desire to create works of great beauty,” the museum presents a controversial interpretation of the so-called “art” from the ice age as if it were fact; instead of creating a contact zone for a meeting of our minds with the powerful aura of the Pleistocene mind still retained by many of these exquisite exhibits, the museum sets out to influence visitors before their visit by establishing the identity of the makers – they were “us” – both inhabiting the “modern” mind.

Use of the term “modern mind” in this exhibition is further given the stamp of approval by brain science and the perceived anatomical similarities between the late Pleistocene human brain and ours. Yet use of the term “modern mind” is not justified and the authority of neuroscience is misplaced. We are light years away from understanding mind and consciousness, despite the current reductionist dogma equating mind with brain.

Joseph Campbell once wrote: “The history of our subject, then, is of the progressive enlargement of man’s knowledge of the magnitude of his own ignorance and the expansion thereby of his wonder.”

The Cro Magnon man was essentially the same as people today. The earliest fossils of Cro Magnons are about 45,000 years old. Civilizations started about 10,000 years ago. For a species that does not reach reproductive age for at least 15 years, actual significant changes due to natural selection probably take at least 50,000 years or more. However, cultures, societies, and most importantly accumulated knowledge once language and writing are developed can change dramatically very quickly. But the genetic factor will be a limit to human development. People wonder why science has slowed down. That's why. In fact, my pessimistic forecast is for humans to decline for a time because of the discovery of birth control. It has shifted human evolution into reverse. The more successful have fewer offspring.

When you look at the precision of the lines, a Matisse would be a Matisse then, just as a Matisse would be a Matisse now. Is an artist's mind not always "modern" and "ancient" both? Does time not separate and join us at once?

The only puzzling piece for me is what tools in those days allowed them to carve so cleanly and polish so finely. Is that information available?

Do you mean they were agent-and-gallery-and-auctioneer-created hypesters?
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Of course not. You mean they were real artists, the kind we ignore now. It is interesting to consider the degree of theft from the primitive in Modernism